Dead Ink Vinyl

Several days ago, Seth Godin’s lead-in to a post conflating rubbernecking drivers with Internet trolls asserted:

People who wouldn’t dream of paying money to watch a snuff film are indulging their curiosity to see carnage on the side of the road and paying with their time and attention.

That’s a pretty dark interpretation of people’s behavior. Maybe he’s right that most people gawk at car accidents to fulfill a deep seeded curiosity about the macabre or forbidden. But since he doesn’t cite any research, there’s no support for his hypothesis. Therefore, I will put forward my equally unsupported hypothesis that paints humanity in a better light¹:

Rubbernecking occurs anywhere there is a promise of a novel experience

I believe that humans are, at heart, storytellers. We crave experiences so that we can relate them as stories to our friends, family, and coworkers — or just to include in our self-narrative. Additionally, the experiences we have in common with others define our tribes and communities. Rubbernecking is an attempt to expand our experiences.

I can think of three separate cases that promise a novel experience:

1. Unique events
2. Educational opportunities
3. Crowds

Unique events

While driving in Toronto several years ago, I got stuck in a four hour traffic jam. I’d missed my exit and was planning to get off at the next exit when everything came to a complete stop. We remained stopped an unbearably long time. People were turning off their cars. Young ladies were sun bathing on car hoods. Every once in a while, the cars would inch forward. Finally, after four hours of intermittently inching forward, I got to the front of the line where barricades had been erected across all of the lanes and the police were directing cars to the off-ramp one at a time.

Do you want me to continue this story? Do you want to know why the police blocked an entire highway and deliberately caused a 4+ hour traffic jam? What if I told you that the story doesn’t end with death or maiming — do you still want to know? Me too. I never did find out, though. Kind of a let-down, isn’t it? The story would be better if I could relate what caused the incident. I did try to see what was down the road — I rubbernecked. Wouldn’t you?

Educational opportunities

I read NTSB reports about plane crashes. Death! Carnage! Heaps of twisted, burning metal! Am I indulging a curiosity? Absolutely — but not the way Seth Godin implies. I’m a private pilot. By reading about the mistakes of others, I can learn from their unique experiences without endangering myself, thereby improving my decision-making and the safety of of my flights.

In fact, I have some of the same motivations when rubbernecking to see a car accident. What happened? How did it happen? What can I learn from that? I admit that I may be a rarity in this aspect, but it is a valid motivation and not at all driven by a darker side of human nature.

Crowds

On a childhood family trip to Yellowstone National Park, drivers were rubbernecking every mile or two. There were no accidents. People were slowing down and gawking out the window at the flora and fauna: bison, elk, deer, bears, plant re-growth after the fire from previous years, and (of course) geysers. And people would gawk at people.

We were alone on a road when we spotted a bear on the side of a nearby hill — or maybe it was just a big rock (it was a good distance away). We stopped the car, got out, and stood around to stretch our legs and gather more information for the bear/rock debate. After a few of minutes, another car came down the road and stopped. Then another. As cars came down the road, they would slow down — assumedly to figure out what everyone was gathered to see. Eventually, our family decided that it was a rock, not a bear, and we drove on. But as we pulled away, more cars were stopping at the site.

Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. The existence of a crowd implies that numerous other people have determined that something is of interest — don’t you want to know what it is holding their attention? What are they looking at? What are they pointing at? What are they talking about? I don’t want to be excluded from an experience.

So rubbernecking is natural, it’s occasionally valuable, it gives us material for storytelling and connecting with our fellow man, and it does not mean that you have a curiosity for carnage. Now move along, there’s nothing to see here.

¹ If you want to spoil this fun of making un-researched and unsupported assertions and actually dig into the issue, try a Google Scholar search for something like “rubbernecking”.

There is a wind chime hanging from the tree in front of my home. Most of the time, it’s as melodic as a New Year’s Eve noisemaker and I wonder why anyone puts up wind chimes. However, once in a very great while, as I pass it in the morning the wind is just right and the chimes make music as if played by God Himself. I know on those mornings that it’s going to be a good day.

In 2008, I posted about 40 articles; I got my feet wet with EC2, Ruby, Rails, Git, Objective-C, and Cocoa; and I committed myself to moving my career away from Java. I haven’t done more than dabble with EC2, Objective-C, and Cocoa, though. However, I have started to use Ruby and Rails extensively. Also in 2008, I joined the team at Flex Authority Magazine as a technical editor.

In 2009, I resolve to:

• Finish reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
• Learn Erlang and develop at least one non-trivial application with it
• Learn git and use it exclusive on at least one project
• Learn Mercurial (hg) and use it exclusively on at least one project
• Learn OpenSolaris and adopt it as a part-time development platform
• Learn dtrace and other application performance analysis tools, and use them to improve the performance of at least one solution I develop
• Learn enough about Nagios for basic system monitoring
• Play with CouchDB
• Spend serious time learning EC2, running instances, monitoring them, respawning them, and so on — get comfortable in the cloud
• Significantly contribute to at least one open source project
• Write 80 or more articles for this blog over the course of 2009

Those are my resolutions for 2009. I’ll update this post as I fulfill each resolution.